


Stark Nonfiction

by Opacifica



Series: Tailspinning Into the Epilogues with Dirk and Jake [1]
Category: Homestuck
Genre: A Bridge From Homestuck to the Epilogues, Alcohol Abuse/Alcoholism, Implied/Referenced Sexual Assault, M/M, Mild To Moderate Kissing, Nostalgia, The Homestuck Epilogues, Trans Characters
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2020-06-26
Updated: 2020-06-26
Packaged: 2021-03-03 21:33:44
Rating: Mature
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 5,000
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/24922381
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/Opacifica/pseuds/Opacifica
Summary: Jake tries his hand at a gentler epilogue.
Relationships: Jake English/Dirk Strider
Series: Tailspinning Into the Epilogues with Dirk and Jake [1]
Series URL: https://archiveofourown.org/series/1819627
Comments: 11
Kudos: 96





	Stark Nonfiction

**Author's Note:**

> [Title from 'Presumably Dead Arm' by Sidney Gish.](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=JW_lWtAkO-o)

“Does it feel different, for you?” you ask idly, turning a golden tinsel-strand noisemaker over and over in your hand. It’s damp, from blowing on it so much. You’re a little damp yourself, your hair clinging a bit where it touches your forehead, and sort of sticking to the carpet beneath your head.

“What, being a sweaty, shitfaced facsimile of a human being? Nah. Feels kinda like it always has, but the tequila fumes are new,” Dirk sighs.

He is also on the floor. The floor is not such a bad place to be, at the moment, with everyone gone home, most of the lights off. If you scrounged about, you could probably reach out and touch a half-full red solo cup or eight, and more seeping into the carpet.

Drinking age on Earth C is twenty. Happy birthday to you. Well. Him, mostly, yours was a few days back, but someone had to pick a day. It was probably Jane. And then someone else had to pick a house. Dirk volunteered his, though he doesn’t really live in it, you gather. The walls are too bare, save for a few party decorations, partially-deflated balloons, strips of multicolored mylar and cardstock cutouts that currently read ‘hapday brythpi’, thanks to a questionably executed ‘prank’ courtesy of one Dave Strider.

There’s a clock on the wall, but it seems mostly decorative. Stalled at 11:11. AM or PM, you couldn’t say.

“No. I just mean.” You gesture vaguely. You aren’t drunk, but you kind of wish you were. It takes an awful lot to get you plastered, these days - the technical illegality hasn't stopped a God, not when the age of getting-into-nightclubs is decidedly lower if you bat your eyes a bit and flash a little thigh, which both you and Jade are very good at. “I don’t know. It’s our last real milestone of maturity, isn’t it? Does it feel any different?”

He snorts.

“Twenty-five. Prefrontal cortex mostly stops developing. That’s a biggie, bro.”

You wonder if he’s even tipsy. Doesn’t sound like he is. You think Dirk’s hoity-toity resistance to substances might actually have something to do with his own masterful command of self. It’s not fun unless you’re getting out of your own head. Not like it tastes good, or smells good, or feels especially good, even, just - it’s a fire escape into the cold air on a punishingly hot night, sometimes, is all. A safety release valve for when the miasma of existence gets too humid and heavy in your lungs.

Is it weird, talking to him here, like this? Perhaps it is very, very weird, and you’re further along the axis of bibulousness than you initially suspected. You have no idea what time it is, after all. The revelry and carousing persisted long past midnight, since the fourth of December, that’s the lovely Lalondes, and they were owed their share of festivities, even if they were only taking ginger ale and grenadine cocktails.

But it’s dark, only the kitchen light still on, and you’re looking up at a rather dusty ceiling fan, marveling at the wan light as it reflects off the party favor you’ve been messing with so as to do something with your hands.

“Fine. S’pose we can throw a different kind of shindig in five years,” you sigh. “I just mean. It’s the last… there aren’t really any more excuses, are there? We’re old enough for anything.”

He snorts his derision.

“Bullshit. The only people who peddle absolutes like that are looking to take advantage.”

There is no shortage of those sort of people, you have to admit. Though you weren’t really thinking about that side of things. You try not to, as a rule. You actually almost hoped that you were being suave. That's a losing proposition, because you aren't. Not in any sense of the word, not organically.

You’ve just been feeling weirdly nostalgic, lately, about so many things. Birthdays are sort of _like_ that, for you. Good things never seem to happen on them. You’ve got more horror-story birthdays than you have all the other sorts combined. You’re eighteen, so you’re a public good, now, because everyone knows how old their Gods are. You learn how much of their restraint was artificially imposed, how flimsy any remainder of a childhood you might have thought to cling to really was. Words on a piece of paper. You're twenty, now, and getting plastered, should you choose to do it, is your fault. Everything changes once you’re old enough for it to change.

Tossing aside the noisemaker, which you’re not certain was damp with _your_ spit anyway, you resume staring at the clock.

“Sure,” you say, for lack of anything more intelligent to contribute. “Sure, yes, I would imagine you’re right.”

He doesn’t respond to that. Charitably, you think. No one knows better than Dirk how much nonsense you’ve stumbled into and out of, over the years. It is a sort of masochism for him, you think, how he so doggedly and avowedly… witnesses it, the things you do. When he would have every right to look away. He could do his television shows on his own. He’s got plenty of talent, he demonstrably doesn’t need to hitch his wagon to your caboose and the scandalous situations it tends to attract. But he does.

Perhaps he sees the same thing you do. That without him anchoring you to something, you are so insubstantial that you would be liable to float off into the ether and disintegrate into the hope-y white light that’s always there when you close your eyes, just the haze of it, even when you sleep.

It’s an act of altruism as much as it is a selfish one, the way he holds you tighter every time you do something that hurts him badly. Like he likes it, how it burns. You don’t. The burn is the bad part. The disconnect is the good part, and he doesn’t know how to do that. Not from himself, and not from you. You have never seen him let go of anything, not really.

Even now, when you lift your head a bit and glance over, his nails are digging into the carpet. His mouth is tight, as though he’s got words in there but can’t even hazard the risk of letting them out.

You can do the stupid chit-chatting for the both of you, you think.

“Do you remember our seventeenth?”

That was a hell of an event. Not the worst, but not the best, either, you suppose. You were sort-of-together, then, you and him. In a strange way. It took you a very, very, very long time to let him or anyone but Jade so much as lay a hand on you, and for all you weakly explained that you didn’t mean it as an insult, you just needed to… to dial it back the whole way to zero, that it wasn’t him, it really, really, _truly_ wasn’t him… how else could someone take that?

Especially Dirk, who puts so much stock in that kind of thing, despite being too proud to voice it. Much too proud to ask for what he needs, but especially that stuff. The hand-holding, the chaste forehead kisses, and even the desperate and uncoordinated fondling, all of that. Everything you’d gotten up to before you went and god tiered. After, well.

After all of that. You thought, for years, that you would never be okay with it again. Which was stupid of you, really, it’s not like Jane hardly touched you apart from the knocking-out bit. You had no actual excuse to jump out of your skin at the brush of his fingers, to feel sick to your stomach at the thought of _anyone’s_ lips on yours. She apologized fervently, meant it wholly, said and did all the right things in all the right ways, was so careful about not being alone with you for so long.

No, in the end, it was just you making excuses that ended things. And while it didn’t end, that first bout of being-’together’, that night, when you all made a trip to the beach, had a glorious bonfire, swam in the ocean and dried off on piles of towels, the driftwood turning the flames eerie colors, telling stories and singing songs… that part was good. But it was underneath. Rose and Kanaya announced a date for their wedding. Dave, for all your hackles were raised about the whole thing, stroked Jade’s beautiful fluffy ears as she glowed with delight, splayed across his lap.

And you sat, with the most stick-straight and rigid posture, exactly six inches away from Dirk, and if nobody thought to comment, everyone could still _see_. And if they didn’t think something horrible about him, they certainly must have thought it about you.

You’d like to say that there was some little sane Jake inside of your skull, trying to make his way out, man up, embrace his fucking boyfriend, throw the man any sort of bone. But there wasn’t. That’s just not how it works. You’re not exactly certain why it’s drinking that does the trick, but it does, and everyone thinks you’re better, now, and you’ve done nothing to dispel that notion.

You told Jade you went to therapy. Dave talks about the stuff enough; he overheard you telling her, and engaged you in a tremendously uncomfortable thirty-minute conversation about CBT, liberally peppered with what, to someone, must have seemed hilarious jokes about the acronym. It has helped him a lot, at least.

It’s not that you didn’t go to therapy so much as you didn’t really know what to say. By the time you were actually in the chair it was like it was all gone. Everything seemed perfectly clear to you. And you told the nice woman so, and she said ‘well, that’s ninety minutes’ after you mostly got done explaining the mechanics of SBURB as she nodded encouragingly and asked that you elaborate on how certain things, like the helplessness of being stuck in a void session, had made you _feel_ , and you answered honestly.

She suggested that you could come in whenever you liked, any time you felt the need to talk about something, that she scheduled appointments by text to make it easy, and she could understand why playing such a game would have you feeling adrift, and why Godhood might be an incredibly challenging position for a young fellow like yourself. And would you mind taking a selfie with her? Just for her daughter, who is a huge fan. Really, come back any time. And please, take her personal number as well, it’s an honor to work with one of the creators. Especially you.

You lied about seeing her once a week for nearly a year. By then, you’d mutually - so very mutually - decided to keep things platonic between you and Dirk, which perversely made it easier to be around him, since there were no more expectations to disappoint, and you could feel that, too, how that somehow hurt him as much as anything, and how he soldiered through it. Just to prove that he could, like as not, to prove that it didn’t actually hurt, or that he didn’t mind the hurting.

Birthdays have always been fraught. Gran died on yours and hers both, though you didn’t find her until a while later. At least it’s not the first of December. It’s the wee hours of the fourth, now, and that’s not a bad day for anything to be at all.

“Yeah,” is all he says, after a very long pause. “Bonfire. Beach. Fuckin’ hate the beach.”

You laugh sadly. Dave was so excited about the ocean, John and Jane just as jazzed to show him and Rose and Roxy around their old stomping grounds in the pacific northwest. So that was that, really. You think Jade might have sort of understood, but… Dave was in, and so was she. You’re not really sure how the trolls feel about the whole ocean-as-recreational-space business. It was a jailer to you, and to Dirk, and that, to a point, is all that matters.

“I do so loathe the beach,” you agree, wishing you didn’t.

“What about it?”

“Just… I don’t know. Sorry. I’m just saying stuff. I promise I’m not guttered out of my skull or any such thing. I miss being seventeen sometimes. I think I did it wrong.”

“Mmm.”

Bad topic of conversation, that isn’t a good ‘mmm’. There are no good ‘mmm’s from Dirk, at least not any that you’ve heard lately. You’ve been trying to clean things up with him, and to clean things up in general for yourself, after things have gone south-er than you planned a few times, realizing just how much time you were losing every weekend. At very least, you know you have to be more judicious about it because you’re building up a tolerance to alcohol and most of the other stuff that would put an elephant to shame.

And you keep waiting for someone to notice, to go ‘oh, gracious me, that personage is royally out of his gourd, gone spinning off every rail, multi-track drifting over the innocent people lined up for weird ethical debates!’ and just… stop you. You keep waiting for someone to stop you. To say ‘no’ to you.

But you’re a God. Might as well be God to some of these people, outrageous a notion that is, and Gods cannot be stopped once they get started.

Like now, the momentum keeps the words spilling out from between your lips.

“I wish I could go back in time. Not like Dave. Maybe like Dave. I don’t know, I just think things must be so easy for him. I’d kill a thousand alternate versions of me if I could be the last one standing, and if it was… somewhere better than it was. A million of them. Everyone else had so much fun that night. Everyone else seems to be enjoying themselves so _fucking_ much, all the time.”

You throw out your arm emphatically and topple a cup, spilling lukewarm beer on your hand. Yech. It fizzes slightly. He doesn’t react, though he must notice.

“I’m sorry,” you add, subdued. “I’ve got no business bringing this to your doorstep. Really. I know I don’t. I’m so sorry, Dirk. I’m really sorry, all the time, probably more sorry to you than anyone else.”

“How the fuck come?”

“What?”

“You don’t have jack or shit to be sorry over. Not - _christ_ , dude, not in literally any universe. We’re cool. We’re square. We’re a lower-symmetry quadrilateral with four mathematically uniform sides _and_ angles chilled below absolute zero. Don’t apologize to me. It just makes me feel like shit.”

“Well,” you complain. “Now I want to say sorry for that, too.”

“Look,” he sighs, raking his hand through his hair. “I get it, okay? I’ve always gotten it. I’m not. That’s not what I am to you. If anyone should be sorry, it’s me. I push. I shouldn’t have pushed you, not after that whole… that trickster shit, and I know there’s other shit, I - I talk to Jane, okay? I get it. Seriously. It went on way too long, even though you were obviously not feeling it. For completely legit reasons.”

“Oh, that’s not a fair characterization at all!” you sputter. “Dirk, you’ve been nothing but a perfect gentleman.”

“I’m aware. I am really, really aware. Doesn’t make it any -”

“Yes it does! It does so make it better! It makes it _much_ better! I just - I wish - I wish…”

He stays still, waits for you to feel your way through it. You gesture overhead, now, not wanting to upend any more beverages, sort of trying to dry your hand off from the last, which is getting sticky on your skin. Not sure what you’re so upset about.

“There’s a way this was all supposed to go,” you say quietly. “A way where it doesn’t end up like this. A good end. I don’t see how anything can go well from here. I don’t - I don’t see how we can get it back.”

“No offense, dude, but you lost me.”

You snort incredulously.

“I don’t think I did. There’s no way you don’t… don’t you feel the wrongness? It’s all so wrong. It wasn’t supposed to be like this. I wasn’t supposed to be like this. Neither were you, I don’t think. It was supposed to end in the sunshine, just - us being kids properly, tromping around in the park and having a home to come back to for supper, and… like the movies, Dirk, it was supposed to be like that, I think. Where the epilogue is just a freeze-frame of Reese Witherspoon tossing her cap in the air while ‘Perfect Day’ by Hoku Clements plays and a closed caption at the bottom says she’s getting proposed to that night and all these good things will happen to her and it fades to black and she smiles it’s… that’s what it’s supposed to be.”

“Bro. I have some bad news about the realness attribute of Legally Blonde.”

“I don’t think my poor heart can take it,” you grumble, only half-joking. “If it’s just going to be a shitty, miserable ending, then we might as well have died for realsies on the quest beds. I might as well have - there were so many times when I had to choose to suffer to keep living. I thought I was going to die retrieving the cans from the temple, but otherwise I would’ve starved, I ran until I dropped when I could have given up, I fought, Dirk, I had to fight to live, so very hard, so many times, and… I did it because there was something better coming, some _relief_ , I always believed that. You were my something better. Jane. Roxy. All three of you. It was going to be so good.”

Silence, again, pooling between you, thick and sticky as the beer drying the hairs on the top of your hand into a mess.

“Dirk,” you say, your voice breaking. “Something messed it up.”

You leave unspoken the other part of that. That the one who’s always been behind the bungled, nonlinear progression of things, the spanner in the works, it’s always been you. You’re the one who can’t get over it, even when Jane seems pretty sure that you have, has given up on most of her precautions, since, after all, you sure do throw yourself around like a cheap party favor given half a chance, what right would you have to shy away from your oldest friend’s innocuous hand on your shoulder? You’re the one who couldn’t make it work with Dirk, but can with literally anyone else who wants a handful of you. You’re the one who lies about therapy, lies about ‘talking it out with Jade’ when explaining your shift in okayness-with-stuff when talking to everyone _but_ Jade, and tells her you’ve been ‘talking with Roxy’, and manages to have it all forgotten about before anyone asks questions, since no one cares much, anyway, so long as you aren’t making trouble.

And you’re not making trouble. You are making boatloads of money, more every time you screw-up or just plain screw your way onto a magazine cover.

You’re sweating, you think. You must just still be sweating from the exertion of dancing, the thrill of socialization and party games and shots. You are sweating and your eyes are wet with it, and also your chest is shaking with sobs.

He doesn’t say a word.

“So I’m sorry,” you say, your face tight and hot with tears. “I am. I’m so sorry. We’ll never get it back. We’ll never - I’ll never - there’s no fixing it. There’s no fixing anything.”

When he does speak, his tone is low and even.

“Fixing it, as a possibility, usually implies that there’s a broken state and an unbroken state. Something to work towards. What would a win look like?”

“Dirk, don’t -” you sniff. “It’s okay, I -”

“Bear with me here, okay?”

You nod wordlessly.

“What would better look like?”

In your mind’s eye, you put your head on his shoulder as the flames dance at the bonfire, feed him burnt marshmallow off your fingertips, kiss it out of his mouth on the way home. You know how to do all of those things, now. They don’t scare you anymore, now that you’ve done it, and so much else, so very many times.

But in the better world, it’s just him. And you splash in the shallows with Rox and Janey as the sun is setting, and you don’t gasp and look all wounded and take it so hard that it ruins the game when one of them trips into you, you just say what you’re fucking thinking, for once, instead of making big sad eyes until people feel bad for hurting you in ways that they’ve already hurt you, in the hope that it will discourage them from doing so again. When you could just say it.

The only thing you haven’t been practicing is _saying it_ , spitting it the fuck out. Not much practice with spitting at all. Heh. A wave of nausea rolls through you.

You were never well-suited for this lifestyle, anyway. Half the appeal to you seems to be the fact that you’re so out of place, the basic asynchrony between whatever you are and the kinds of things you do. People like that, feeling like they’re the first to do something, that they’re getting fingerprints on you and teaching you things you never would’ve thought to do, and you play along.

But you can’t lie to Dirk like that. He will never be the first to do anything to you, except what little you got up to in the few safe havens of LOTAK, in the dark, cautious and fumbling, both of you so incredibly careful of each other despite the reckless thing you were doing. His binder and drawers stayed on. You never even got your shirt off, really.

“I can’t imagine a better without undoing a whole heap of worse,” you say. “I think some things are wrecked for good.”

“Oh, come the fuck on. Name something specific. Ten boonbucks says we can fix it. You want a beach day redux with the original-flavor quartet? Legally Blonde graduation ceremony reenactment, complete with subtitles declaring you the happiest fucker on Earth C? Fake it till you make it. Tell me what you want out of Jane, I’ll set it straight. I know we’ve all been loosening up about some shit. We can tighten it right back up. Nothing’s unfixable.”

That’s how he’s always been. Always ready with an improbable solution that nonetheless saves that day. If it’s broken you, realizing how much these last four years _fundamentally can’t be fixed_ , what will it do to him, when he sees that it is hopeless?

He will beat himself bloody against the bars of an unbreakable cage. Maybe he’ll even enjoy it, knowing him. But there is no truly undoing the past. Even Dave can’t really do that.

“Would you kiss me?” you ask, very softly. “Like you would have. Imagine none of it happened, and we’re just… we’re just back there, at the bonfire, and it’s…”

And you’re not liquored up and practically sticking to the floor, and your friends haven’t all gone home, and your head doesn’t ache, and your heart doesn’t feel fucking hollow.

“Just pretend,” you add. “How it would’ve been.”

Fantasy has always been the closest thing you have to genuine comfort. Not always, when you think about it. You were so happy, once. It was you and your gran and everything was tuberoses and mango nectar and love, it was love, that’s what it was. And everything since then has been sour for not being that specific kind of sweet. The thing that you want back more than a drowning man wants air has burned away to ashes, long since scattered by the wind on an island to which one can ride a tourist ferry, for a fee. Even that is not your island. It’s Jade’s, and if you were willing to visit, you’d find your own much-scorched stuffed corpse amongst the rubble, meticulously preserved. A model of what you might be like, some day. Her memories are not love, are not like yours, and she doesn’t like to talk about it much.

“I can do that,” he says, just as quiet, his tone gone low and gravelly.

You lift yourself up by your elbows. Your shoulders creak, and your hair tries to stick where it’s been, but you manage it, and you don’t get too dizzy, either.

The vertigo you feel is more realizing what you’ve asked him. How cruel this will be, if you can’t follow through. You already know he’ll wait for you to be ready until the heat death of the fucking universe. False hope is the most monstrous thing there is. You luminesce with it. It radiates actinium blue-white from your pores. The gamma rays will fry him, unspool his DNA and permeate his bones and erode his liver, if he gets too close.

He sits up as well, smiling, hopeful. For tonight’s party, he swapped his shades for a pair of oversized novelty sunglasses, at Dave’s urging, and he’s long since abandoned them. He’s bathed in the sickly white light emanating from you. He doesn’t know he’s looking at an anglerfish lure, the same one you’ve been chasing even though it’s anchored to your body, always tantalizingly out of reach, no matter how fast or how mightily you swim.

“It’s okay,” he says.

You want to believe it. Your face is slick with tears, and you take your glasses off to try to mop them up with the back of your hand, which is - yep, still sticky. You should wait, shouldn’t do this here, on the floor of his home, in the detritus of a party you’ll block from your memory with any luck at all.

But you want to kiss him. You always have, first for curiosity’s sake, then for the sheer overwhelming excitement of it, clumsy and excessively enthusiastic on both your parts, graceless. You’ve learned what ‘good kissing’ means, by his standards, and then by everyone else’s.

His eyes shine coal-black in the low light. They’re gold as honey in the sun, but not right now. It’s been a long time since you saw them at all.

“Dirk,” you say, and he stops, barely half a meter between you. You don’t want to make things worse, and the momentum has already taken over, but you just have to say something. You just have to say something that makes this all make sense, that gives him context, that makes it clear how fucked up you are, how it can’t be anything more than a bit of a song and dance, his saving you from this. He can’t save you, can’t protect you, not from yourself. You have to make him understand that. “I love you.”

“I love you, too,” he says, with certainty beyond even your capacity to suspend your disbelief, his face uplit by your luminescence.

You do want to believe him. So you decide that you do. You take the lifeline, seize the floatation device he’s slung in after you, knowing the only thing the other end is tied to is his waist, that he will drown, for his troubles, when your frantic thrashing pulls him in too. You are too desperate to care. You just need to get your head up, just enough to breathe, and there's no one in the world you wouldn't kill for a lungful. Not even him.

You kiss him before he kisses you. His lips are relatively dry, his face smooth, his body solid and strong, even more so, of course, than when you were younger. You kiss him, and you don’t stop until he’s panting against your mouth, and your hand is fisted tight in the back of his shirt, and you’re glowing bright enough to sear a hole in lead, to put Chernobyl’s elephant’s foot to shame.

His expression is all awe, no fear.

“You taste like cranberry juice,” he says.

“Had one with Rose,” you mumble. “Just to clear my head a tad.”

“I love you,” he says again. Pure relief in his tone.

“I love you,” you echo, because practice is how you learn to believe improbable things, and become them, live in what you’re not sure you’re capable of being. You aren’t sure, until you do, and you are, and then the sureness is part and parcel with existence.

He’s protected you before. Tried, at least. He’s the only one who’s ever really tried, since your gran got murdered for it. Maybe this time it will work. Maybe he can survive you. Maybe he can survive this tangled mess of story you’ve written for yourself, too snarled up for retcons or time or anything else. If anyone can do it, it’s him.

You kiss him again, and again, and again, until he’s on his back, on the ground. And from there it's all muscle memory, a dance you know intimately. For once, you’re teaching someone else, not the other way round. Showing him what you’ve made of yourself. What you can do, now, what practice has taught you to be okay with, completely, like you were before all the everything, but so much better, now. You can share your gratitude this way.

And this time, perhaps it will be okay. Perhaps this story will end with you smiling, like Elle Woods, all right in the world. Like it always should have.

He tastes like tequila. You do not stop kissing him for a very long time, but it’s anyone’s guess how long. The clock, after all, hasn’t moved a millimeter.

**Author's Note:**

> [The epilogue.](https://www.homestuck.com/epilogues)


End file.
